Shotgun Stories (2008)

It’s a common claim that the American movies made since the 1970s ended have yet to equal that generation’s pictures’ power and unrest and exhilarating defection from conventional form. That statement might err a tad on the broad, but I’m willing to accept the general notion; as well as the complaint that the last few generations of filmmakers have been too much the movie brats-more interested in tipping the hat to past movies than forging a new trail. Many of our best filmmakers today are guilty of this too-there’s too much self-consciousness, too much concern over being considered a great filmmaker. Every frame of most of the critically acclaimed films these days seems designed to telegraph its own brilliance to the audience (I think this was friend and occasional contributor Travis’s issue with No Country for Old Men.) Zodiac, a wonderful movie from last year, still has this insistence: a loaded-I’ve-seen-every-Kubrick-and-Pakula-movie-ever-made-fifty-times-film-geek-fever. That fever worked for Zodiac. It helped unravel Fincher’s Fight Club and Panic Room.

Writer-director Jeff Nichols’ Shotgun Stories is one of the most phenomenal debut films I can immediately recall, and its success derives as much from what Nichols doesn’t do as what he does. (The restraint here, particularly for someone twenty-nine years old, is extraordinary.) There’s no affectation here, no overbearing critic-proof checklist of influences (a friend remarked that soon all critics will have to do is catalogue the old movies to which the new movies allude). Shotgun Stories is a confident picture; a picture so pared down and intuitive that it’s destined itself to under-evaluation. Some people, people used to the anti-violence movies that deliver more porny-come-on bloodshed than the supposedly pro-violence movies (the anti-violence action picture has become the most hypocritical, self-pandering subgenre in American movies) may watch Shotgun Stories, half-bored, and come away thinking they haven’t gotten their money’s worth.

The people who get on the picture’s wavelength may walk away a little dazed, amazed by what they’ve been missing from most movies (as I did). Shotgun Stories captures a festering self-rage born of failure and disappointment and impotence; and never compromises it for one of its ninety minutes. (This may be a true 9/11 picture-if Hal Ashby had been around to make one.) Shotgun Stories has a bit of the distinctly Southern slow-burn intensity of Billy Bob Thornton’s Sling Blade-only with the Sam Shepard gothic turned way down. The Hayes boys, like Karl Childers, or Daniel Plainview or Travis Bickle, turn towards violence as a potential lancing of their boils, but Nichols takes it one step further-he doesn’t get us off. Those other pictures build and build and build-and eventually work themselves up to some startling catharsis. The violence here, almost all of which is entirely off-screen, is awkward, conventionally disappointing, and carrying a brilliant side-effect: this refusal to purge takes us straight into the Hayes’ heads without pyrotechnics as a relief or distraction or convenient object of distance-we’re right by the Hayes’ and plugged into their itchy, disjointed restlessness (watch how Nichols uses the entire screen and how he gets you to dread every oncoming car). This is a rare, mature, infinitely more terrifying variety of suspense.

Shotgun Stories takes off from its leading man, Michael Shannon, that strange charismatic presence who’s probably best known for his turn opposite Ashley Judd in William Friedkin’s effective Bug. Shannon also nearly, briefly, stole all the other actors’ thunder in last year’s Before the Devil Knows Your Dead. It was obvious from Bug that Shannon was talented, but I’m not sure I was ready for his Son Hayes, at least not this soon in his emerging film career. Shannon’s discipline shaded a potential one dimensional wacky in Bug, but here he reaches a newer plane of dialed-down ache. Shannon is one of those actors, who can, and it’s nearly impossible to quantify, show you their thought process; he invites you in, as Kael used to say about certain actors. Shannon is handsome in an unconventional-alien way, and he has a way of appearing to be a found object regardless of the context of the film at hand.

Shannon is playing, on paper, a Hollywood favorite-the tortured man of few words with daddy and machismo issues. But it feels, and this is the mark of a major actor, totally new as you’re watching it. This probably has something to do with the picture’s surprising sense of humor. It’s not a humor of superiority, as many pictures set in the South have a habit of indulging in, but a humor of blitzed-bruised humanity. Son and his brothers, Kid (Barlow Jacobs) and Boy (Douglas Ligon), sit on a deserted street corner and one says “this sure is a dead town.” One of the others says it’s like they own it. Another says if he owned it he’d sell it. You laugh at this-but it’s a snowball of a laugh-a little something that gathers weight and force. All of the actors are effective and eerily appropriate for their roles, but it’s Shannon’s Son that unifies the picture. There’s a surprising intelligence and wounded romanticism floating around in Son-both of which remain largely squandered (which is where the rage springs from). As you gather all of this you find yourself authentically, against your instincts, liking Son. (If we wish to continue to belabor the 1970s references, Shannon would appear to be, in one person, both sides of the Al Pacino-John Cazale team-up that occurred in The Godfather, The Godfather Part II and Dog Day Afternoon. Shannon has Pacino’s disconcerting capacity for ruthlessness and Cazale’s baby-faced vulnerability.)

That snowball, as snowballs are wont to do, continues rolling off course-this is one of those pictures of appalling inevitability. Shotgun Stories, after several vignettes that establish, without hammering, the Hayes’ unspoken, barely-understood-even-by-them misery, finds its proper start at the Hayes’ father’s funeral. The Hayes’ mother tells them he’s died. (I won’t ruin how she tells them, or what time she tells them the funeral is to take place.) And the brothers appear at the funeral to voice what they see as a proper accounting of the father who left them and started an entirely new family-four other young men who also share the Hayes name. What happens at the funeral (it has a shocking gravity-particularly because of Nichols’ and Shannon’s refusal to overplay) rekindles an old hatred between the two Hayes broods.

I don’t want to say too much more. Shotgun Stories is a picture that you need to see devoid of my going over every scene, but the ending (no specifics, at least at this point) must be mentioned. The picture, after clearly setting us up for another fatalistic showdown-again undermines us. Boy, the doughier, least ambitious Hayes, makes a choice at the climax-a leap of faith and love and lasting courage, that punctures the nihilism we brace ourselves (and even partially hope) for. Boy, bucking the tide of man’s-gotta-do-what-a-man’s-gotta-do perversion that dominates more than just a small town’s way of thinking, makes a leap that leads to a final image of pathetic regret laced with a wee bit of hope. Boy embraces a kinder, truer, male obligation-a plea for a right to lay down the gun or sword or missile; a right to expect something more than has ever before been available. Shotgun Stories also clarified why I think I loved WALL-E so much; after so many we’re-going-to-hell films, it’s braver to point not to the wreckage, but to what should, but probably won’t ever, lay beyond it.

★★★★

Posted on July 7th, 2008 in Reviews, Drama, 2008 |

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